Enter the Cyprus market with a .CY Domain

No. Article 8.1 of the registration agreement grants the right to apply «irrespective of whether a person is a permanent resident of the Republic of Cyprus or not». You do not need a Cypriot company, a local address or a representative. If you apply as a legal entity, article 8.14 lets the Administrator accept a certificate of incorporation issued by the authorities of the country where you were formed; for individuals, article 8.15 accepts an identity document from Cyprus, an EU member state, or any state recognised by the United Nations. A Turkish company can therefore apply with its own trade registry record.

There are three options: one, two or five calendar years. Article 13.1 limits the licence to those three values, article 13.2 ties renewals to the same set, and the registry's own fee table has exactly three lines. The detail that matters is this: the term is not a continuous range between one and five — three and four year registrations do not exist. Choosing five years pushes your renewal calendar out the furthest; if you want something in between, the only route is to take two years and then renew.

Documents are not demanded on every application, but the Administrator may ask for them and the deadline is short. Article 8.6 requires your application to be decided within one working day, and one possible outcome is a request for supporting documents. When that happens, article 8.9 gives you three working days to upload them through the system, otherwise the application is rejected automatically. What can be requested is a certificate of incorporation plus proof of the representative's authority for legal entities, or an identity document for individuals. Prepare digital copies before you apply.

Yes, but the window is narrow. The Administrator sends notice one month before the licence ends and repeats it weekly through that final month. If the renewal fee is not paid, the licence is cancelled automatically; articles 13.5 and 13.6 then let you reclaim the name by paying the renewal fee plus a separate reassignment fee, and cap that route at ten working days. Article 11.10 keeps the name closed to third parties during the same period, so nobody else can take it in those ten working days. After that it returns to the open pool.

Cyprus has no accredited registrar model, so there is no registrar-to-registrar transfer; applications go straight to the registry's automated system. What can move is ownership, and article 14.1 limits that to three cases: inheritance for individuals, merger or acquisition for legal entities, and a transfer to a new licensee at the current licensee's request. In the third case the new holder's details are disclosed, the application is re-evaluated, and once approved the transfer fee is paid within two working days. The licence is not reset — it runs to its normal expiry date.

Because Cyprus has no public WHOIS server on port 43. The whois field in IANA's .cy record is empty, and the commonly quoted address whois.nic.cy does not resolve in DNS at all, so standard whois clients come back blank. Registration data is published from the registry's own database instead, and under article 4.3 the public access level contains only four items: the domain name, the registrant's name (only if the registrant is a legal entity), the licence expiry date and the name servers. For other extensions you can use our WHOIS lookup page.

In terms of rules there is none. Both fall under the same Regulatory Decision and the same registration agreement, and they share identical terms, character rules and document handling. In the agreement's category table, «cy» is described as a first level domain name for general use, while com.cy is a second level name «for registration by all entities». The real difference is the pool of available names: a direct .cy address is shorter and more sought after, while the same label may still be free under com.cy. Taking both is also possible.